All Souls College, Oxford


All Souls College is a constituent college of the University of Oxford in England. Unique to All Souls, all of its members automatically become fellows. It has no undergraduate members, but each year recent graduate and postgraduate students at Oxford are eligible to apply for a small number of [|examination fellowships] through a competitive examination and, for those shortlisted after the examinations, an interview.
The college entrance is on the north side of the High Street whilst it has a long frontage onto Radcliffe Square. To its east is The Queen's College whilst Hertford College is to the north of All Souls.
The current warden is Sir John Vickers, a graduate of Oriel College, Oxford.

History

The college was founded by Henry VI of England and Henry Chichele, in 1438, to commemorate the victims of the Hundred Years' War. The Statutes provided for a warden and forty fellows; all to take Holy Orders: 24 to study arts, philosophy and theology; and 16 to study civil or canon law.
Today the college is primarily a graduate research institution, with no undergraduate members. All Souls did formerly have undergraduates: Robert Hovenden introduced undergraduates to provide the fellows with servientes, but this was abandoned by the end of the Commonwealth. Four Bible Clerks remained on the foundation until 1924.
For over five hundred years All Souls College admitted only men; women were first allowed to join the college as fellows in 1979, the same year as many other previously all-male colleges in the university.

Buildings and architecture

Codrington Library

The All Souls Library was founded through a 1710 bequest from Christopher Codrington, a fellow of the college and a wealthy slave and sugar plantation owner. Codrington was an undergraduate at Oxford and later became colonial governor of the Leeward Islands. Christopher Codrington was born in Barbados, and amassed a fortune from his sugar plantation in the West Indies.
Under the terms of his will Codrington bequeathed books worth £6,000 to the college in addition to £10,000 in currency for the library to be rebuilt and endowed. The new library was completed in 1751 to the designs of Nicholas Hawksmoor and has been in continuous use since then. Today the library comprises some 185,000 items, about a third of which were published before 1800. The collections are particularly strong in law and history.
Sir Christopher Wren was a fellow from 1653, and in 1658 produced a sundial for the college. This was originally placed on the south wall of the Chapel, but in 1877 was moved to the quadrangle.

Chapel

Built between 1438 and 1442, the college chapel remained largely unchanged until the Commonwealth. Oxford, having been a largely Royalist stronghold, suffered under the Puritans' wrath. The 42 misericords date from the Chapel's building, and show a resemblance to the misericords at Higham Ferrers. Both may have been carved by Richard Tyllock.
During the 1660s a screen was installed in the Chapel, which was based on a design by Wren. However, this screen needed to be rebuilt by 1713. By the mid-19th century the Chapel was in great need of renovation, and so the current structure is heavily influenced by Victorian design ideals.
All services at the chapel are according to the Book of Common Prayer; the King James Bible is also used rather than more modern translations.

Wealth

All Souls is one of the wealthiest colleges in Oxford, with a financial endowment of £420.2 million. However, since the college's principal source of revenue is its endowment and it does not earn income from tuition fees, it only ranked 19th among Oxford colleges in total income. All Souls is a registered charity under English law.

Fellowships

Examination fellowships

In the three years following the award of their bachelor's degrees, students graduating from Oxford and current Oxford postgraduate students having graduated elsewhere are eligible to apply for examination fellowships of seven years each. While tutors may advise their students to sit for the All Souls examination fellowship, the examination is open to anybody who fulfils the eligibility criteria and the college does not issue invitations to candidates to sit. Every year in early March, the college hosts an open evening for women, offering women interested in the examination fellowship an opportunity to find out more about the exam process and to meet members of the college.
Each year several dozen candidates typically sit the examination. Two examination fellows are usually elected each year, although the college has awarded a single place or three places in some years, and on rare occasions made no award.
The competition, offered since 1878 and open to women since 1979, is held over two days in late September, with two papers of three hours each per day. It has been described in the past as "the hardest exam in the world".
Two papers are on a single subject of the candidate's choice; the options are classics, English literature, economics, history, law, philosophy, and politics. Candidates may sit their two specialist papers in different specialist subjects, provided each paper is in one subject only. Candidates who choose Classics have an additional translation examination on a third day.
Two papers are on general subjects. For each general examination, candidates choose three questions from a list. Past questions have included:
Before 2010 candidates also faced another examination, a free-form "Essay" on a single, pre-selected word.
Four to six finalists are invited to a viva voce or oral examination. Previously, these candidates were then invited to dinner with about 75 members of the college. The dinner did not form part of the assessment, but was intended as a reward for those candidates who had reached the latter stages of the selection process. However, the dinner has been discontinued as the college felt candidates worried too often that it was part of the assessment process.
About a dozen examination fellows are at the college at any one time. There are no compulsory teaching or requirements, although examination fellows must pursue a course of study or research at some point within their first two years of fellowship. They can study anything for free at Oxford with room and board. As "Londoners" they can pursue approved non-academic careers if desired, with a reduced stipend, as long as they pursue academia on a part-time basis and attend weekend dinners at the college during their first academic year. each examination fellow receives a stipend of £14,842 annually for the first two years; the stipend then varies depending on whether the fellow pursues an academic career.

Notable candidates

Until 1979, women were not permitted to put themselves forward for fellowships at All Souls.
Successful
Other categories of fellowship include:
There are also a number of professorial fellows who hold their fellowships by virtue of their University post.

Chichele professorships

Fellows of the college include the Chichele professors, who hold statutory professorships at the University of Oxford named in honour of Henry Chichele, a founder of the college. Fellowship of the college has accompanied the award of a Chichele chair since 1870.
Following the work of the 1850 Commission to examine the organisation of the university, the college suppressed ten of its fellowships to create the funds to establish the first two Chichele professorships: The Chichele Professor of International Law and Diplomacy, established in 1859 and first held by Mountague Bernard, and the Chichele Professor of Modern History, first held by Montagu Burrows.
There are currently Chichele Professorships in five different subjects:
Probably the best known former Chichele Professor is Sir Isaiah Berlin. Perhaps the best known former Professor of the History of War was Cyril Falls.

Chichele Lectures

The Chichele Lectures are a prestigious series of lectures formally established in 1912 and sponsored by All Souls College. The lectures were initially restricted to foreign history, but have since been expanded to include law, political theory, economic theory, as well as foreign and British history. Traditionally the lectures were delivered by a single speaker, but it is now common for several speakers to deliver lectures on a common theme.

Customs

Every hundred years, and generally on 14 January, there is a commemorative feast after which the fellows parade around the college with flaming torches, singing the Mallard Song and led by a "Lord Mallard" who is carried in a chair, in search of a legendary mallard that supposedly flew out of the foundations of the college when it was being built. During the hunt the Lord Mallard is preceded by a man bearing a pole to which a mallard is tied – originally a live bird, latterly either dead or carved from wood. The last mallard ceremony was in 2001 and the next is due in 2101. The precise origin of the custom is not known, but it dates from at least 1632. A benign parody of this custom has been portrayed as the Unseen University's "Megapode chase" in Sir Terry Pratchett's 2009 novel Unseen Academicals.

People associated with All Souls

Fellows

Past and current fellows of the college have included:
– inventor of the Western "equals sign".
– Bishop of Lichfield in 1771, Bishop of Worcester in 1774, and Bishop of Winchester in 1781. Portrait by Tilly Kettle.
by John Cooke – British Conservative statesman who was Viceroy of India and Foreign Secretary. Portrait after John Singer Sargent.

Gallery